Whenever I write on ethnic issues, I generally get a really strong response. And by “strong,” I am not talking about those who are perpetually aggrieved and who express their grievances strongly—although they are frequently involved in it. I am talking about something a bit simpler. I am talking about levels of interest, about how many people read a particular post as opposed to my musings on, say, my boyhood wanderings in the woods.
For those just joining us, and if you are really interested in the topic, I have a couple of books on the topic. The book Black & Tan has to do with the legacy of slavery, and on what it means to be (as I am) “repentant, but unreconstructed.” That book is available here, and should also provide you with the necessary backdrop for understanding why I get the reactions I do. And for not a few of you, that reaction is something like “I think Wilson is being really reasonable here. Why is everybody flipping out?”
The second book is called Skin & Blood, and is available in e-formats for one dollar here.
One of the reasons a real conversation on this is so difficult is that we get “lumped in” with others. Racial animosity is a reduction sauce; everything gets boiled down to the rudiments. Those rudiments may or may not represent what you are thinking at all, and most likely do not.
Someone has a genuine “heritage, not hate” affection for the Confederate flag, and yet someone else cannot forget that this was the flag being flown at his great-grandfather’s lynching.
Someone thinks that we need to get at the vestiges of bigotry that are present in so many little things, and yet someone else sees nothing but cultural Marxism in the language of micro-aggressions and intersectionality. And his great-grandfather died in Korea fighting the commies.
And then somebody says, “Are you equating what happened to your great-grandfather to what happened to my great-grandfather?” and we are off to the races.
The Christian path is not supposed to be a moderated form of whatever it is the pagans are doing. Christian whites are not called to a muted form of the racial animosity that is found in the Klan. Christian blacks are not called to a muted form of racial animosity that is represented by Black Lives Matter. And if this makes you bridle, wanting to offer some sort of mitigating explanation for the Klan or for BLM, then congratulations, you are the problem.
Think in terms of equal weights and measures. The judgment with which you judge, you shall be judged. “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matt. 7:1–2). If you lump others in together with criminals they repudiate then you will be lumped in with criminals that you repudiate. This is how God governs the world. What goes around comes around.
Refusal to recognize this principle is why all our efforts at racial reconciliation have simply made things worse. We do have a disease that isn’t disappearing the way we wish it would. But at some point I trust that we will stop lamenting how virulent the disease is, and come instead to a realization that our doctors are really incompetent.